Singing in the Rain

Okay, we're not actually singing in the rain.  But we are singing quite a lot lately!  Jocelyn just loves Loves LOVES to sing!  She will come home singing songs she learned at day care.  Some I have never heard before, but some are old classics.  My favorite is when she sings "Baby Bumble Bee."  It brings me back to second grade!

Funny story about that - she had a banana with dinner.  Well, she was done eating, but still had some banana left.  She started to sing the Baby Bumble Bee song and when she started to 'squish' her bee, she simulated the bee with a chunk of banana.  Okay, it was a giant mess.  But that was appropriate to the song, so it's all good!

Jocelyn turned 25 and then 26 months without an update.  I know.  But I'm too busy being an awesome parent to have time to chronicle it.  Still, though, I need to do better.  Because the days just pass on by and blend together.

We are typically terrible in these 2's.  But it's Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde.  When Jocelyn is good, she is super, duper sweet.  A few days ago, she kept on hugging Donovan and yelling 'Baby Brother!'  It was adorable!  But then 10 minutes later she snatches a toy from him and tries to push him out of my lap.  But the cute and sweet are SO cute and sweet, that it totally overpowers the terrible.

Her vocabulary is getting SO GOOD!  The other day I brought home some toy cupcakes.  When she saw the box, she said, "I so excited 'bout my new cupcakes!"  She also mimics us a whole lot, which is pretty funny.  When we ask her to do something, we often hear, "I doing something right now," or "I wanna play wiff toys for a few more minutes."  She is also getting really good at figuring out grammar and parts of speech.  Sometimes she gets them wrong, but she's always following the same logic.  For example, she will say she 'clean upped' or 'taked the toy.'  It's pretty clever.  She is also working on her gender pronouns.  She is starting to get she/he and her/him right, but sometimes she will use she when she meant her or he when she meant him.  I don't know if that is normal or if she is advanced, but it's pretty dang good. 

It all means that we need to be extra careful.  I recently struggled with some task (I don't remember what... opening something, something physical) and I couldn't get it.  So I said, "Stupid thing!"  Guess what Jocelyn repeated.  But that's not as bad as when a Pepsi can got knocked over and Mike yelled, "Oh shit!"  You'll never guess what Jocelyn yelled in response.  Actually, she repeated it for the next 10 minutes.  But we didn't call any attention to it, and she stopped saying it.  Phew! 

My little dessert fiend certainly takes after her mama's sweet tooth, let me tell you.  She LOVES dessert.  She talks about it all the time.  She seeks out clothing with ice cream and cupcakes on it.  She is obsessed with birthdays because of birthday cake.  When it was Lily's birthday, she kept on talking about going to Lily's birthday party and having birthday cake.  She also practiced saying "Happy Birthday Lily."  We had dinner with Laura and Joe recently, and she is obsessed with going back to their house.  Why?  Because we had dessert there!  But, as much as she loves it, Jocelyn still usually can't be bought.  We can't bargain that she could only have dessert if she eats her real food.  She is stubborn enough to forego teh dessert so she doesn't have to eat what she doesn't want.  We find ourselves on the side of the adults in the Pink Floyd song - 'If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!  How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?'  It's funny.

She liked dessert so much that she enjoys watching cupcake decorating videos on YouTube.  There is a series called YoYoMax 12 that she loves to watch.  There are a few episodes that we have watched a few times.  There is a Sesame Street characters one, a flower one, an apple one and a few more that are in the rotation.  She loves to play with her play kitchen and make us food and dessert.  And now that she has the new cupcake set, she has even more options.  It's pretty awesome. 

But she also likes birthdays in general.  She likes birthday cards a lot. She enjoys coloring in people's birthday cards.  She also loves to look at and play with her birthday cards.  It's very cute.  She knows who got her which ones.  Her favorite is the one from Aunt Sarah with the - guess what - ice cream cone on the front!

She still fights bed time like the dickens.  And we are still working on potty training, but it has stalled and possibly even back slid some.  She is mostly only interested at night, as a bedtime stall tactic. But they are working on it at daycare as well, and they send her to the potty at each diaper change.  And she wears Pull-Ups.  Of course, I can't send her with the unbleached kind.  All the other girls have the pink kind with Minnie Mouse and Cinderella.  So those are the ones she wants.

Jocelyn is starting to understand about boys and girls, and that she is a girl.  It's cute when she talks about little boys and little girls.  But, because she is in daycare, she is learning that boys and girls can interact and play at all of the same activities.  So she builds blocks, and climbs and jumps, she plays imagination games with play food, she does arts and crafts... and they all do the activities.  They are mostly child-led, but they are fairly balanced so far.  So that's nice.  If she was home with me all day, she'd surely see more daytime TV (I'd need a break here and there) and she would start to learn expectations of girls and boys from the commercials.  This way I can shield her from it long enough that she hopefully chooses her interests based on what she really wants, and not some weird expectation.

But she protests going to daycare in the morning sometimes.  She claims that she wants to stay home.  Now, more often than not, when I get there to pick her up she wants to 'play for a few more minutes.'  So it's not like she hates it there.  She just hates transitions.  And I think she likes hanging out with us and playing with her own toys.  I always feel bad dropping her off.  And then I feel sorry for myself when she doesn't want to come home with me at the end of the day.  I can't win :-P.